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German federal prosecutors descended on Deutsche Bank\u2019s Frankfurt headquarters and Berlin offices Wednesday morning, conducting searches as part of an investigation into alleged money laundering. The raid cast a shadow on what should have been an unblemished moment of triumph as CEO Christian Sewing announced booming annual profits at Germany\u2019s largest lender.<\/p>\n
The morning after the raid, Deutsche Bank announced its highest annual profit since 2007: $8.5 billion net profit in 2025, powered by robust investment banking revenues. CEO Christian Sewing also unveiled a more than $1 billion share-buyback program and signaled confidence in the bank\u2019s turnaround.<\/p>\n
But, as news of the investigation broke, shares in the German bank dropped 1.86% Wednesday and improved only slightly on Thursday even after the upbeat earnings report.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe confirm that the Frankfurt public prosecutor\u2019s office was on site in our offices on Wednesday. This is related to transactions dating back to the period 2013-2018. It is based on an allegedly late filing of a suspicious activity report,\u201d a spokesperson for Deutsche Bank told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cOn this basis, the prosecutor is assessing whether there was any potential money laundering. We are of course fully cooperating with the public prosecutor\u2019s office.\u201d<\/p>\n Although Sewing was not CEO during <\/strong>the time in question, having taken the helm of Deutsche Bank in April 2018, he has been a member of the lender\u2019s executive board since 2015.<\/p>\n Deutsche Bank has been trying to overcome a long history of compliance failures and regulatory scandals. The German lender was raided once prior, in 2018, regarding alleged tax evasion and money laundering. Wednesday\u2019s raid followed several civil suits against the bank filed last fall.<\/p>\n Since 2000, Deutsche Bank has paid more than $20 billion in fines and penalties related to 101 different regulatory violations, watchdog organization Good Jobs First reported. The bank admitted fault in 13 out of the 101 cases tracked by the group, with the remaining 88 cases settled without an admission of guilt.\u00a0<\/p>\n Deutsche Bank is also facing pending litigation in Europe and the U.K. Last October, five former employees sued the lender in London, alleging that an internal audit\u2014overseen by <\/strong>Sewing (then head of audit)\u2014falsely implicated them in a complex derivatives scheme based in Italy. The trades allegedly masked hundreds of millions in investor losses. The audit, they claim, led to their wrongful prosecution and convictions for false accounting and market manipulation\u2014verdicts that were overturned in 2022.<\/p>\n Italy\u2019s Milan Court of Appeal agreed that Sewing\u2019s audit \u201cunquestionably influenced\u201d the charges.<\/p>\n Deutsche Bank previously denied wrongdoing in a statement to Fortune<\/em>. \u201cAs disclosed in our Annual Report, the bank has been aware that five individuals have threatened to file claims in the U.K. in the context of this matter. Deutsche Bank considers all such claims to be entirely without merit and will defend itself against them robustly,\u201d a Deutsche Bank spokesperson said, emphasizing that Sewing was not named in the latest London legal filing.<\/p>\n David Zaring, a business ethics and law professor at Wharton, said Wednesday\u2019s raid makes him wonder if Deutsche Bank will ever get out from under its past. \u201cThey\u2019ve paid a lot of fines, and a lot of fines for money laundering in particular, as well as wider compliance areas,\u201d he told Fortune<\/em>, \u201cIt\u2019s fair to say that they have had a compliance problem. And I\u2019m guessing that they hoped they\u2019d solved some of those problems already.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Frankfurt prosecutors confirmed they are investigating \u201cunknown responsible parties and employees\u201d over suspected money laundering connected to transactions between 2013 and 2018. <\/p>\n Specifically, prosecutors are examining whether Deutsche Bank failed to file suspicious activity reports in a timely manner\u2014a violation that German regulators have treated with increasing severity. In February 2025, BaFin (Germany\u2019s financial watchdog) hit Deutsche Bank with a $27.5 million fire related to three separate regulatory offences. Then, in November, it imposed a record $52.5 million fine on JPMorgan for alleged \u201csystematic failure\u201d to submit timely money laundering reports.?<\/p>\n Bloomberg<\/em> reported that the probe centers on Deutsche Bank\u2019s business relationships with companies linked to Roman Abramovich, the sanctioned Russian billionaire who made his fortune in metals and energy before gaining international prominence as Chelsea Football Club\u2019s former owner. A legal representative for Abramovich denied any wrongdoing to Bloomberg<\/em>, and also denied that the searches were related to his activities at all, <\/strong>stating his client \u201chas always acted in accordance with applicable domestic and international laws and regulations.\u201d<\/p>\n The 2013-2018 timeframe under current investigation by the Germans overlaps precisely with Deutsche Bank\u2019s relationship with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. That connection ultimately cost the bank more than $350 million in settlements and fines. During those same years, the bank opened more than 40 accounts for Epstein and his entities, processing millions in suspicious transactions despite regulators finding \u201csignificant compliance failures\u201d and inadequate monitoring of account activity.? The bank has since apologized for its relationship with the disgraced financier.\u00a0<\/p>\n The case also echoes the bank\u2019s <\/strong>involvement with Danske Bank\u2019s Estonian branch, which processed $227 billion in suspicious transactions largely originating from Russia and the former Soviet states between 2007 and 2015. Deutsche Bank allegedly facilitated approximately $627 million in so-called \u201cmirror trades\u201d through Danske Bank in Lithuania\u2014part of what became Europe\u2019s largest money laundering scandal. That relationship contributed to a $186 million penalty imposed by the U.S. Federal Reserve in 2023 for the bank\u2019s failure to remediate long-standing anti-money laundering deficiencies.<\/p>\n Separate from the Danske Bank scandal, in 2017, New York regulators fined the bank $425 million for operating a \u201cmirror trading\u201d scheme that moved $10 billion out of Russia through its Moscow, London, and New York offices. U.K. regulators added their own penalty, with the Financial Conduct Authority documenting how over $10 billion was transferred out of Russia \u201cin a manner highly suggestive of financial crime.\u201d<\/p>\n Under Sewing\u2019s leadership, the bank has made considerable investments in strengthening controls, including bolstering anti-financial-crime processes through technology, training, and additional specialized staff, a Deutsche Bank spokesperson told Fortune<\/em> last year. Regulatory investigations since 2020 have resulted in compliance reforms, and the bank has terminated numerous high-risk client relationships.?<\/p>\n But the latest raid stands to remind the German lender how long the tail of compliance failures can extend.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDeutsche Bank had it worse from 2013 to 2018. But this does make it look like they\u2019re back in the situation they were in 10 years ago,\u201d Zaring told Fortune<\/em>. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t think anyone wants that.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Raid #Deutsche #Bank #hurts #lenders #attempts #leave #long #history #scandals<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" German federal prosecutors des… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":17162,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[2],"tags":[11105,200,11098,11099,1555,2265,11100,9095,11101,6537,1627,11103,4382,3253,215,11104,2855,11102,5402,3452,3643],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17161"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17161\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/17162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/microvibenews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}The latest allegations<\/strong><\/h2>\n
A familiar refrain<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Can Deutsche Bank ever move on?<\/strong><\/h2>\n